LIVING LIFE TO PIECES

LIVING LIFE TO PIECES

After unimaginable loss, Shannon & The Clams cross the astral plane into adulthood

Mandy Brownholtz

"I fucking love all the weird magic and coincidence and kismet that I’ve ever experienced,” says Shannon Shaw pensively. “I’m into seeking the symbolism. It gives me comfort."

If you aren’t yet acquainted, Shannon is the husky-voiced singer-bassist leading her eponymous garage rock band Shannon & The Clams. She’s recounting a day in Tualatin, Oregon, years ago, when she had stopped at a Lane Bryant in a strip mall to find something to wear to a wedding. As she waited for her bandmate Cody Blanchard to pick her up in the parking lot, it started pouring rain, so she went into the Starbucks and ran into Joe Haener, who would eventually become her fiancé. She had had a crush on him for years, so she invited him to be her plusone. He couldn’t make it, but that chance meeting set into motion a series of events that would change her life forever.

Shannon made a new friend at the wedding, Sienna Swan, who owns an animal rescue. There she would eventually adopt her beloved papillon mix Spanky Joe in the aftermath of Haener’s tragic death in a car accident in August 2022—mere weeks before their own wedding, what Shannon said was to be the “ultimate hootenanny.” It was fully planned down to the donkey, also rescued by Swan, who would cart cold cans of beer around the reception in a pocketed blanket draped over its back.

“If I hadn’t bumped into Joe that day, I don’t think we would have ever gotten together. I wouldn’t have met Sienna if he had decided to be my date, because I would have been distracted by my hot crush, you know? That’s weirdly beautiful and special."

We cross paths with Shannon & The Clams, Spanky Joe in tow, on a golden Saturday evening in early June. Washington, D.C.’s Meridian Hill Park felt like a Clams song: blossoms blooming, twilight looming... They were easy to spot spilling out of an Uber in coordinated black, white, and red outfits, looking like they had walked out of an alternatedimension sock-hop spaghetti Western.

The band seemed understandably reluctant as we took photos. It must have been oppressively hot under those layers of vintage polyester. They were exhausted from tour, probably kind of hungry, eking out a few precious hours to speak about the worst thing that had ever happened to them, the focus of their new album The Moon Is in the Wrong Place. Shaw stood statuesque as a retro pinup opera diva, her platinum blonde hair piled high atop her head with a big red ribbon.

For the uninitiated, the project began in the late aughts when Shannon began signing herself up for open mics in the Bay Area as Shannon & The Clams, a nod to the types of band names you might see on a mid-century jukebox, the clearest influence for their sound. They twist ’50s greaser rock and ’60s girl pop like a soft-serve ice cream cone on the boardwalk, with an ironic contemporary effect (in this metaphor, a zhuzhed-up waffle cone). The band covered Del Shannon’s “Runaway” on 2013’s Dreams in the Rat House, which says it all. What began as a joke became something Shaw couldn’t shake.

This latest record still plays with those sounds, although they’ve become more refined. The Moon Is in the Wrong Place sets itself apart as Shannon & The Clams’ most earnest record. While it isn’t their first dealings in the themes of grief and loss—201 B’s Onion grapples with the tragic fire at the Oakland DIY venue Ghost Ship in 2016—it is perhaps their best. With this album, the band rises to the front of the pack of middling Burger Records-era garage rock bands they’ve always traveled among comfortably. It also sounds more polished than previous efforts, exiting the scuzzy garage and entering hi-fi sound courtesy of longtime collaborator Dan Auerbach’s (Black Keys) label Easy Eye Sound.

Shaw has come a long way from those early days, both musically and otherwise, but she hasn’t ventured away from Clams, or her other role in beloved Cali queercore band Hunx and His Punx. And on a phone call in late July, bandmate (and the Hunx in question) Seth Bogart reminisced about when they met in their midto late 20s:

“I remember her saying to me, I can’t believe you took me on tour, I barely knew how to play at the time.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but you have the greatest voice ever.’”

Bogart had seen her and the Clams play at a house party in the Bay Area around 2008 and was “floored by Shannon’s voice and performance.” Shannon and Cody met at California College of the Arts, where Cody lived with former member Ian Amberson in a big house where they used to throw crazy shindigs. And then of course the raucous Hunx—in a 2010 interview with The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Shaw recalled a show in Paris where they played along a canal that was “basically in a gypsy camp": “Seth wore a banana hammock made of candy that broke at a very inconvenient time. Instead of helping him with his suddenly public family jewels, some demon of entertainment overtook me and made me tear the remaining candies off his bod and throw them into the audience."

Bogart remembers this too, laughing sheepishly when asked about it. “Those were my wild days," he sighs. “We used to get very wild, and we would drink a lot. [Once] she barfed at Graceland. I don’t know if I should tell these secrets about her...” he trails off, suffice to say: “We had a lot of fun back in the day.”

In many ways, this record exemplifies the end of the party; those carefree days are over. The Clams have entered middle age with enough personal baggage to garner an extra fee at the airport. Since that fateful day in August of ’22, Shaw has relocated from Portland to Los Angeles with the help of Seth and their other bandmates. They found her a room in a house with a big yard for Spanky and a studio to tinker with her visual art projects. Bogart says they watch movies and play lots of games. She’s joined a grief group.

“I think of it as being able to finally unbutton a pair of tight jeans and take your bra off at the end of the day,” she explains. “I think it’s because you’re with people who totally get it, [so] it’s easier to be yourself and access all the emotions that generally we’re holding in all day around the ‘normal people.’”

But the grief group is merely a spot of time in a long week; she finds a lot of respite in the companionship of Spanky Joe.

“For the first couple of months, he gave me a reason to get up,” Shannon remarks poignantly. “If I couldn’t take care of myself, if I couldn’t feed myself, or make myself drink water, or make myself take a shower, then at least I had to take care of this perfect, innocent little being, and by caring for him, it would influence me to take care of myself. ”

From the day Spanky landed at the rescue, there was an odd sense that they were meant to be together; he was the first dog she felt a “weird, deep connection with," but she couldn’t have a dog in the Portland apartment she shared with Joe. When Joe died, she and Cody went up to Petaluma to adopt Spanky.

“[Joe and Spanky] were alive at the same time, but I’ve always felt they crossed paths on the astral plane or something. Joe passed by and was like, 'Dude, you have a job to do. You have to take care of Shannon right now.’”

These sorts of cosmic patterns—the ones that Shaw “fucking loves”—underwrite much of the record, even the title. This was the vehicle to process grief, and as far as one can tell, Shaw does this by attributing meaning to what more cynical folks would ascribe to life’s mundane coincidences. But it’s much too simple to write the record off as a mere testament to grief; it’s less a funeral song and more a celebration of life. It reminds the listener that unfairly, grief often allows for the best art, like some sort of sick consolation prize.

Even Bogart notes the uptick in Shaw’s musicianship, evident on the new LP. “I think she has continuously grown as a musician, but that growth really went to new extremes when she was writing the Clams record,” he remarks. “I come from more of a punk music place where I don’t know how to read music, I just do it all by my ears, and that was always fine with Shannon. But then we went back to writing songs after she did the Clams’ album, and she was like, ‘What note is that?’ And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?”’

He laughs. “It forced me to learn and grow myself, because I suddenly had to keep up with a more professional musician, who started out on my level and then surpassed me by far.”

In many ways, he thinks she wanted it to be perfect for Joe, so she pushed herself to take things to the next level. The turnaround here was lightning-fast; the timeline begins in August 2022, of course, and they recorded the album over February and March 2023, which left a six-month period for them to write the songs. Talk about fresh.

It s obvious that the loss is still very acute, a testament to its magnitude. Early in the interview she becomes visibly emotional; tears gather in the corners of her eyes and they lower to Spanky Joe, nestled in her lap. Shaw says that the songs began to write themselves almost immediately, but one had already been written.

When Shaw wrote the LP’s opening track, “The Vow,” before Joe’s death, she was supposed to surprise him with a performance of it at their reception, but ultimately couldn’t. “I was kind of fixated, ruminating on the fact that he was never going to get to hear that song,” she begins. “I wanted to find a way to capture the moment of going from totally innocent to everything being destroyed and turning into chaos and falling apart, and so it just felt like ‘Hourglass’ coming next was a really important pairing, because I feel like it captures the nightmare.”

I DIDN’T KNOW THAT I IDAS GONNA WRITE somETHinc so FUCKING JOYOUS

SHANNON SHAW

Some of Shannon’s growth as a songwriter may come from the turmoil of that time, but also, ironically, the peace that follows. “The more important things rose to the top, and the annoying, not helpful noise of the world that used to really stress me out is gone. My fears have changed. I feel way less afraid, and I have this much deeper appreciation for things I didn’t have before.”

Which explains lead single “Bean Fields,” named for the setting of the accident. The song is a highenergy romp, triumphant and celebratory, rife with chirping crickets and bellowed woo-hoos. Despite the hard-earned wisdom that informed the song, she feared the so-called “normal people” wouldn’t get it.

“I had moments of 'How can I take all this agony and discomfort and turn it into something that anyone wants to listen to?’ But then, as the songs were coming, like Bean Fields,’ there’s joy,” she remarks. “I was like, ‘Okay, I didn’t know that I was gonna write something so fucking joyous.’ Then I was worried that it was going to be off-putting to be grieving and put out something so joyous and celebratory. But then I realized I don’t care. This is what’s coming out of me.”

When Shannon & The Clams play “Bean Fields" early on in their set at the Black Cat later that evening, the crowd bobs and sings along. Has the party started again, in a new incarnation, something more akin to an Irish wake than an Oakland house party? If it is an Irish wake, you notice that the living slip in and out of the past tense when they eulogize. “He would have been so...he was such a huge fan of hers,” Bogart recalls. “I think that this is probably blowing his mind. ”

“[We had this] crusty little love seat that was Joe’s music spot. The arm of the chair that was next to the record player is worn down to the wood from him leaning and just holding a record. I can see him doing that right now. He worked his ass off all day long and would come home, take a shower, and just be so exhausted. He’d stick a Miller or a Bud Light or some crappy beer in the freezer and know exactly how long to leave it in there. It would be slightly icy. And he’d experience the record. He experiences music differently than I do,” Shannon says warmly. “I was always like, I want a relationship like that with music, and I’m a professional musician. He was way closer to music than anyone I’ve ever known.”

The dead live outside of time, in all the tenses, but the living should, ideally, only live in the present— easier said than done. So how does Shaw—and the rest of the Clams, for that matter—live, here and now? They’ll remain on the road for much of the calendar year, but what about after that? Will they finally rest? “That really doesn’t happen,” she says. She plans to dive deeper into her visual art; she’s making sketches she wants to turn into a book. She’s experimenting with sculpture and ceramics.

“It’s a lot of timepieces,” she specifies. “I made a giant bottle that I’m experimenting with ceramic pencils and drawing into it, and I have ceramic watercolor, and I’m painting these intricate scenes on the bottle. The whole idea is about capturing time in a bottle, like if I could trap time and keep Joe forever _ in a physical way.”

And there’s the new Hunx record, being recorded now, which is a compilation of songs written “before, during, and after this tragedy,” according to Bogart. “It’s a pretty heavy Hunx record, but it’s also still really fun. It has a lot of comedy, but also a lot of heartache. Sometimes the only way to get through dark times is to laugh."

Seth pauses, considering once more how his old friend has weathered this storm. “Just watching her in the last two years, I’ve been amazed over and over about her ability to process the grief and honor him, but at the same time, move on with her life. She’s not being destructive. She’s creating beautiful art."